A Good New Year To One And All

Once again it is January the First, the beginning of a new year and governments and the capitalists find themselves in the midst of a worsening climate crisis. Each new report reveals the weakness of capitalism, as all the basic contradictions in the system exacerbate the emergency. This new year may well be the decisive one.

Capitalism is a system of society which divides people rather than unites them — capitalist from worker, men from women, blacks from whites, nation from nation. It teaches us competition not co-operation competition for jobs, housing and something that approximates to a bearable standard of living. The division between capitalist and worker is inherent in capitalism — their interests are totally opposed and can never be reconciled. But the divisions between workers are not inherent —they are encouraged by the conditions in which we live and work but could be overcome through a recognition of our common class interests, our mutual inter-dependence and, above all, the need for radical change. It would be nice to think that people throughout the world will write their New Year resolution to make 2020 the year that they will organise democratically with their fellow-workers to abolish capitalism and bring about a society in which we can all start to become healthy, happy and wise. But unfortunately our New Year prediction is capitalism will continue through 2020 and it is s a constant source of astonishment to us that our fellow-workers rather than make a wonderful world are prepared to endure a world full of misery. 2019 was not a happy new year, nor was 2018, 2017, 2016…We need to do more than wish one another with the platitude that things will get better. We have the power to change the world and the ability to run it in the interests of the human race. That is our New Year message to all our fellow-workers.

Is our message so hard to understand? No! It is the very essence of simplicity. The workers produce the wealth of the world, the capitalists own it. Just as the workers hand over what they produce to-day to the capitalists, they could keep it for themselves if they wished to do so. The capitalists perform no useful task in wealth production, they are just drones. They take the fruits of the workers' labour because the workers let them and the workers let them do so because they are bemused by the myth that drones are necessary. It is not remedies for particular social diseases that we need but the removal of the source of all social disease—the legal figment that enables the idle-rich to live off our toil. The aim of the capitalists is to force or cajole the workers into the submissive attitude of willing slaves, heaping up wealth for others to enjoy, and flattery and promises, cant and hypocrisy will be instruments used to secure this end.

So we deliver the same New Year message as we have before. Working-people can control their destinies once they shed their delusions and cast off the useless burden of capitalist privilege that they have borne upon their backs for so long. But the work they have to do must be done by themselves. With leaders they drift, leader-free they progress.  The only path is knowledge of what we are, wealth producing slaves of capital, and what we can be, freely associated workers owning in common our means of production and using them to supply the needs of all, without distinction of any kind except youth, old age or sickness, freeing of suffering humanity from the source of its sorrows!